Inline Editing and the Cost of Leaky Abstractions

Many of the problems described above can be worked around by adding additional visual cues, exposing normally hidden fields in floating toolbars, and providing other normally hidden information when editors have activated Inline WYSIWYG. Additional secondary editing interfaces can also be provided for "full access" to a content item's full list of fields, metadata, and workflow states.

However, the addition of these extra widgets, toolbars, hover-tips, popups, and so on compromise the radical simplicity that justified Inline Editing in the first place. On many sites, a sufficiently functional Inline WYSIWYG interface -- one that captures the important state, metadata, and relational information for a piece of content -- will be no simpler or faster than well-designed, task-focused modal editing forms. Members of the Plone team discovered that was often true after adding Inline WYSIWYG to their CMS. After several versions maintaining the feature, they removed it from the core CMS product.